Those who wish to pursue this genre of children's
folklore
will find
samples of children's taunts and retorts in various collections of children's
lore.
samples of children's taunts and retorts in various collections of children's
lore.
Childens - Folklore
The observations
made by Virtanen with regard to the use of verbal ambiguity and getting
the victim to fall into a trap of which he himself has participated in the mak-
ing, are common to many forms of children's lore, such as catch routines,
knock-knock jokes, riddles, and phone tricks.
Phone tricks, for example, all seem to share a common denomina-
tor: They are all fabrications that rely on ambiguity. This ambiguity exists
at several levels (Jorgensen 1984, 104-16). Perhaps the most apparent use
of ambiguity is with reference to speech play, or the ambiguity of words
(puns, homonyms, and so forth) that allows for the possibility of everyday
speech to be manipulated for fun and humor. A second level of ambiguity
is a kind of social-interactional ambiguity whereby the identity of the caller
may not be known to the victim. The use of the phone almost guarantees
that the identities of the individuals remain unknown. This ambiguity of
identity makes it quite easy for youngsters to engage in phone tricks and to
do the exasperating things that they would be highly unlikely to do in other,
less safe circumstances. The use of the telephone affords them an anonym-
ity that allows for a certain license to participate in this kind of trickery, rela-
tively free from the fear of the retribution or embarrassment that might oc-
cur in face-to-face settings (Jorgensen 1984). The last kind of ambiguity exists
at the level of social structure and is related to the position of the teenager
in the hierarchy of the social order. The adolescent in our society is in an
ambiguous period in his life, being neither child nor adult.
These phone tricks may be viewed as occurring at an ambiguous time
in the life of the caller, taking place in an ambiguous social-interactional set-
ting (because of the use of the phone), and sometimes utilizing the ambigu-
ous quality of words in order to play with everyday speech, to demonstrate
communicative competence, and to gain a sense of personal power (espe-
cially within the peer group). Phone tricks are just one example of the pranks
common to children's folklore.
Some of these behaviors are reserved for "special occasions. " In the
United States the two main times of the year historically set aside for the
playing of pranks and tricks are Halloween and April Fools' Day. The same
two days are set aside in the British Isles, with the addition of Mischief Night
on November 4 (the eve of Guy Fawkes Day), which is considered by lona
and Peter Opie (1959) to be a postponed celebration of Halloween. Mis-
chievous or impolite and disrespectful behavior by children on special days
of the year may be viewed as a reversal of everyday norms of polite behav-
ior and it is allowed to some extent or perhaps even anticipated. As long as
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? ? the tricksters and pranksters don't go too far-as long as their actions do
not injure anyone or cause great damage to property or life-the mischief
is usually excused. On some other day of the year it might not be. On Hal-
loween, as well as on Mischief Night in England, the behavioral reversals
tend to involve children and teenagers as initiators of unsociable acts aimed
either at peers, adults, or other authority figures, but on April Fools' Day
adults tend to join the children as the initiators of pranks and tricks. Many
of the traditional April Fools' tricks, such as the "fool's errand," involve face-
to-face interaction between the trickster and the victim, but most of the
Halloween pranks (which are often directed against personal property) oc-
cur under the cover of darkness: The pranksters are usually unseen and un-
known.
The unknown identity of the Halloween prankster is, of course, a
safeguard against retribution by the irate victim. The prankster's unsociable
and harmful behavior, however, is also reminiscent of the traditional behavior
associated with ancestors, ghosts, or other spirit powers, who are given free
rein to return to earth and cause trouble or play tricks on the living once a
year. Such practices are known in many widely separated cultures through-
out the world-from the Druidic celebration of Samhuin on the eve of 1
November to the Day of the Dead in Mexico, and even the Milamala har-
vest celebration reported by Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands (1954).
Some very creative and innovative pranks perpetrated by teenagers in New
York in the early 1970s are reported in an article published by Catherine
Harris Ainsworth entitled "Hallowe'en," which appeared in September of
1973 in the New York Folklore Quarterly. The following excerpts are from
essays on the topic of the celebration of Halloween, perceived and experi-
enced by 18- and 19-year-olds, and they illustrate some important points
about the social interactions and reversals of everyday polite behavior that
are associated with October 31 in our culture. Most of the teenagers who
chose to include reports of pranks they had played in their essays were boys,
although one young lady did mention briefly that she enjoyed tipping over
mailboxes and causing trouble by scaring people. Interestingly, one of the
best accounts (in terms of the most detailed recording of socially unaccept-
able behavior) was signed "anonymous," which is of course symbolic of the
social-interactional significance of this special night with regard to the prank-
ish behavior perpetrated by "unseen spirits of the night":
To start the night rolling we would soap a few windows and rap on
them when the people would be watching television. Next we found
a tree limb that grew over the road. A couple of us would climb up
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? ? and tie a dummy on a rope. As soon as a car was almost under the
tree, they swung the dummy right down in front of it. They would
either stop and get out and start cussing or just slow down and keep
going. (pages 180-81)
I remember Hallowe'en because that's the night the fire company was
called out to quench a blaze that measured a few inches in width but
stretched over two miles down the center of our local main road. It
was also the night the police received several complaints from irate
motorists who'd been shocked out of their pants when someone
dropped a very life-like looking dummy in front of their car. But as
the years passed, we became more mature, which is another way of
saying our plans became more devious, more daring, and more imagi-
native. Ours was the first town with a psychedelic cop car. It was also
the first with a stop and go light that turned green in all four direc-
tions at the same time. (pages 183-84)
Halloween is a night of mischief for all, not only for young children,
but also for the older teenagers. On the way to my friend's house I
paid a visit to a few of my neighbors. After receiving dirty looks from
them all year I thought it was an appropriate time to harass them.
So I broke a few of their pumpkins. I picked up my friends and we
headed out toward Main Street . . . We stood outside of Carrol's
Hamburger Place, freezing, for about an hour. We were trying to think
of something special to do. Then one kid came up with a great idea.
We decided to buy some eggs and plaster the cars of the other guys
that were hanging around Carrol's. Within a half hour every car at
Carrol's was dripping with egg yolk. The cold weather made the eggs
freeze almost instantly. We decided it was time to get home before
we either got ran over or shot. (page 186)
These essays show that much effort and ingenuity were involved in
the planning and executing of these Halloween pranks, many of which ulti-
mately involved adult authority figures. The two-mile long fire is a good
example of such creativity and ingenuity. Although this prank was attention
getting it remained relatively harmless.
There is also evidence to support the claim that "once a prankster,
always a prankster. " Although the types of pranks tend to change with age,
pranks remain part of the adult's repertoire. The young man quoted above,
says, "But as the years passed, we became more mature, which is another
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? ? way of saying our plans became more devious, more daring, and more imagi-
native. " It might also be noted that the young man who broke his neighbor's
pumpkins explained that he was taking the opportunity to do so on this night
of socially licensed misbehavior to retaliate for the dirty looks he had been
receiving from them all year long. One could say that this is the way pent-
up or repressed hostile emotions are expressed. The most common examples
of traditional Halloween pranks in the United States-such as removing gates
or barn doors, putting rockers in trees, putting wagons on roofs, turning over
outhouses, soaping windows-all involve either the partial destruction of
property or its removal from its proper place. These pranks tend to be indi-
rect assaults on persons through their property, rather than confrontation.
Conversely, on April Fools' Day, the object is not to damage someone else's
property but to cause embarrassment by casting the victim as socially in-
competent or foolish through various forms of trickery.
The practice of playing tricks on April Fools' Day is one that seems
to be particularly popular with school-aged children. The attraction of such
socially sanctioned trickery for young schoolchildren is evident in the words
of a twelve-year-old Scottish girl from Edinburgh who was interviewed by
lona and Peter Opie in connection with their research on "Huntigowk Day,"
the Scottish equivalent to April Fools' Day. The young girl told them:
"Huntigowk is a day I love. I like to put a basin of water at the side of my
sister's bed and hear her let out a yell when she puts her feet into it. I also
put an empty eggshell in an eggcup so that when she opens it she finds that
there is nothing inside it" (Opie and Opie 1959, 245). The playful delight
in teasing, trickery, and possibly even some undertones of sibling rivalry are
all noticeable in this child's testimony. Thus, April 1 might be characterized
as a socially sanctioned day on which behavior involving playful trickery can
be given free expression by those who find a special pleasure in such activ-
ity. It is important to add that the setting aside of this one day for such
licensed trickery allows for control of its duration (only a twenty-four-hour
period in the United States and only until noon in the British and Canadian
traditions) and of the traditional nature of the trickery and deceit (usually
only prescribed kinds of tricks are engaged in).
One way to look at April Fools' behavior is to see it as an inversion of
everyday politeness or face-saving behavior. This interpretation is based on
the assumption that in naturally occurring, everyday talk a certain serious-
ness is assumed to exist. Normally, speakers and listeners engaging in conver-
sation seek a common understanding of what is being discussed (Mehan and
Wood 1975, 124-25). In other words, attempts are normally made to com-
municate within a common frame of reference. During April Fools' trickery,
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? ? however, these assumptions of polite seriousness and a common frame of ref-
erence are abrogated. A deception is attempted, based on a lack of serious in-
tent, and the potential victim is unaware that the usual seriousness does not
apply to the situation at hand. The importance of the victim's being unaware
is well illustrated by the fact that it is easiest to accomplish successful decep-
tions early on the day of April 1 before potential victims have had tricks played
on them by other tricksters and have thus been alerted to the fact that it is a
day on which tricks and jokes are likely to occur.
The purpose of these tricks is to make the victim look foolish. The
victim is made into the fool as a result of his or her own actions, as is also
the case in children's catch routines, riddling, and knock-knock jokes. Con-
versely, in teases and taunts victimization does not usually depend on the
victim's actions. In most taunts, the body, language, or other characteristics
of the person are attacked simply and directly, and no specific social situa-
tion is necessary. Although the element of fabrication is largely missing, the
embarrassment and discomfort of the victim are still the major element.
TEASES
As will be recalled from the table in the introduction, I prefer to discrimi-
nate between taunts and teases on the basis of the degree of harm in the vic-
timization. I consider teases to be relatively mild, possibly even benevolent
and playful forms of social interaction of children and sometimes adults.
Valuable studies based on interviews with schoolchildren regarding
both taunting and the less disturbing kinds of teasing have been carried out
by Scandinavian folklorists Leea Virtanen in Finland (1978) and Erik Kaas
Nielsen in Denmark (1976). Each of these children's folklorists, working
separately, has identified forms of teasing (both verbal and nonverbal) that
can be interpreted as a sign of affection.
Virtanen makes some important observations concerning the inter-
pretation of aggressive teasing behavior in chapter five, "The Teasing Tra-
dition," of "Children's Lore" (1978). She says, "Actions which to an out-
sider seem aggressive are the socially acceptable manner of showing posi-
tive feelings" (page 61), and that girls are capable of regarding "heavy
handed treatment" by boys as evidence of positive feelings. This last obser-
vation is illustrated by the following excerpt from an interview with a young
schoolgirl: "The biggest sign of love was when he hit me on the head with
the atlas. It hurt, but it was lovely" (page 61). It is not known, of course, if
the boys who engage in this type of teasing would interpret their behavior
as a sign of love toward the girls! Virtanen cites other examples of nonver-
bal teases used by Finnish girls to demonstrate love for a particular boy, such
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? ? as lifting him by the hair and kicking him, or throwing things like snow-
balls, pebbles, or lumps of clay at him. Teases like these, which basically
involve chasing or attacking, have probably always been prevalent among
children. I recall kicking, slapping, and hair pulling as being favorite means
of gaining attention from the opposite sex when I was growing up in the
mid-1950s in southern California. Retaliation, such as washing the girl's face
"with a leather glove till she is as red as fire" (page 61) would follow if the
bid for attention was successful. (Ignoring such a claim to attention might
be considered to be an insult to the girl seeking such a response! ) Virtanen
believes that teases, which may also include verbal forms such as name calling
or the composing of witty jibes, are a means of establishing contact between
the sexes, and that each sex has its favorite procedures for doing so.
Virtanen's interpretation is supported by Nielsen's research (1976) into the
psychological motivations and sociological functions involved in teasing by
Danish schoolchildren (pages 53-54). In a personal communication (Septem-
ber 20, 1981) Nielsen expanded on the idea that the words, gestures, and
acts used in teasing are expressive forms of communication, codes that must
be decoded: "After all, teasing is a kind of code which you may/must inter-
pret according to your mood and relations to the teaser. " Nielsen's interviews
revealed that most pupils considered teasing to have both positive and nega-
tive aspects and that they understood that "in certain cases teasing is only
an attempt to create contact, especially in relation to the opposite sex" (1976,
53), findings very similar to those of Virtanen with regard to using teasing
as a means of reducing social distance between individuals. Four of the twelve
reasons noted by Nielsen for Danish schoolchildren's teasing are positive:
love (the parent's love for the child), friendship, and sympathy; love (emo-
tions for the other sex), flirtations, courting; playfulness, high spirits, need
for fun; isolation, solitude, teasing as a means of contact.
The excellent research done by these two Scandinavian children's folk-
lorists concerning the benevolent forms of teasing is supported by Richard W.
Howell in his work Language in Behavior (1976). Howell advances the idea
that playful teasing is an attempt to deny social distance and that it is there-
fore symbolic of a wished-for closeness between the people involved (page 4)
rather than a form of hostility or violence. This analysis of teasing as sym-
bolic of a potential closeness that does not quite exist seems applicable to the
boy-girl teasing reported by Virtanen and Nielsen. Play grouping according
to sex reflects the social distance between the sexes, especially in the school
context, and thus playful teasing (such as boys and girls chasing each other
or throwing snowballs or erasers at each other) could be viewed as an attempt
to seek contact in a relatively safe, nonserious manner.
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? ? TAUNTS
If teases can be viewed as contact-seeking devices, then taunts can be dis-
tinguished as verbal strategies that attempt the opposite-to increase the
social distance between people. While teases are characterized here as be-
ing mainly positive, taunts are usually motivated by more malicious inten-
tions and negative emotions (such as hatred, envy, displeasure, revenge, the
wish to dominate, or a desire to compensate for one's own weaknesses).
Children's taunts can be examined as reversals of everyday, or nor-
mally expected, behavior, as can most other tricks, pranks, and teases. The
norms of politeness in society are based on the assumption that it is to the
interest of all to attempt to maintain each other's sense of "face" (that is,
self-concept, or feelings of self-worth). Brown and Levinson (1978) have
labeled acts that threaten this mutual support of face as FTAs, "face-threat-
ening acts" (page 65). They have identified several kinds of FTAs, the two
main ones being "off the record" (more ambiguous, or "safe") and "on the
record" (no ambiguity, less "safe") (page 74).
Children's use of traditional taunts and retorts at the elementary-
school level places these strategies of verbal aggression into the "bald on
record" subdivision (page 65) in which there is no attempt at redressive ac-
tion (or "softening the blow") on the part of the speaker. Applying Brown
and Levinson's research on politeness behavior to the subject of children's
taunting strategies, it follows that this kind of verbal aggression is "the most
direct, clear, unambiguous and concise way possible" (page 74) to carry out
an FTA and thus attempt to bring about a loss of face or sense of personal
esteem to the victim.
The directness gained by using taunts as "bald on record" FTAs is
somewhat offset by the fact that such strategies are less safe than the "off
record" ones, which are more open to question or interpretation because of
their ambiguity. The use of "bald on record" FTAs is quite likely to upset
the victim and cause him or her to seek revenge when exposed to this di-
rect, clear, and unmistakably intentional form of verbal abuse. This element
of risk tends to support the idea that those who are not worried about the
risks are confident that their own power (verbal or physical) is superior to
that of their victims.
The reaction of the victim of such verbal abuse is important. Most
verbal assaults are said face-to-face to the intended victim, probably with
the purpose of observing his or her reaction, which it is hoped will be one
of embarrassment or hurt feelings. It is usually intended that the words cho-
sen for the verbal attack will wound the child in his area of greatest sensi-
tivity and cause him to be visibly upset. Crying is often the proof that this
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? ? goal has been achieved, as illustrated by the traditional chant "I made you
sigh, I made you sigh; And pretty soon I'll make you cry" (Millard 1945,
31). It is always possible, however, that through verbal agility (such as the
use of a clever retort, for example) or some other means, the quick-witted
child may be able to retaliate and thus reverse the potentially painful situa-
tion, making the aggressor the victim instead. In Virtanen's previously cited
research on children's verbal aggression, it has been observed that the chil-
dren who are the most defenseless and seem not to be able to fight back are
the ones who are most often chosen as victims, irrespective of the "undesir-
able" personal traits or other social "shortcomings" that might make them
appear to be logical candidates for such abuse (Virtanen 1978, 60).
As with the other traditional pranks, tricks, and teases discussed, it
should also be emphasized with regard to taunts that the context of their
use is crucial to their meaning. It is possible that the most vicious taunt could
be used in such a way that no real harm is intended or experienced by the
individuals involved. As an example of one of the many possible uses of ver-
bal aggression, Brown and Levinson discuss the use of seemingly threaten-
ing "bald on record" insults and jokes as communicative strategies for as-
serting that a certain degree of intimacy exists between the people involved.
Thus there is minimal danger of "face" being threatened. Conventionalized
insults can thus solidify friendship (page 234). In addition, many adults I
have questioned in the last few years on the subject of traditional taunts and
retorts claim that some of their favorite rhymes as children were valued for
their humor rather than their malice. They recalled using taunts such as
"Fatty and Skinny were laying in bed; Fatty rolled over and Skinny was
dead" in a joking manner, more for the fun of chanting it than for hurting
another child's feelings. It should be remembered that children use taunts
for a variety of purposes, and that fact should be kept in mind in the at-
tempt to understand the use of taunts and retorts.
Those who wish to pursue this genre of children's folklore will find
samples of children's taunts and retorts in various collections of children's
lore. Examples of such collections in the English-language tradition include
the work of P. H. Evans, Knapp and Knapp, Withers, Northall, Yoffie, and
Winslow. In addition, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959) by
Iona and Peter Opie is a comprehensive and well-documented collection of
various genres, including traditional taunts and retorts from the British Isles.
The significance of the material and its analysis, however, is not adequately
dealt with (Bernstein 1960).
Journal articles dealing exclusively with the subject of children's jeers
are fairly rare. In 1945 an article by Anna K. Stimson dealing with taunts
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? ? used in New York City at the turn of the century appeared in the Journal of
American Folklore, and, also in 1945, a similar study of "chaffing formu-
las" by Eugenia Millard appeared in the New York Folklore Quarterly.
Millard's article contained a rudimentary attempt at classification on the
twofold basis of ethical standards and pseudo-prejudices, but her main in-
terest was in establishing the antiquity of the rhymes within the English tra-
dition. In a more recent work, Winslow (1969) constructed a classification
scheme based on derogatory epithets, one that he believed could be applied
to the traditional rhymed formulas used by children. His four categories in-
cluded play on a child's name and comments on physical peculiarities, mental
traits, and social relationships.
Martha Wolfenstein's analysis of the thematic content and functions
of joking behavior in Children's Humor (1954) is a study of the meaning of
children's attempts to use language to solve emotional problems. Although
mainly concerned with joking and riddling, her analysis of underlying mo-
tives and her discussion of the use of rhyme and proper names give impor-
tant clues to similar processes that might also apply to the jeers used during
the child's latency period (six to twelve years), which also make extensive
use of rhymed taunts.
In general, the literature contains many collections in which taunts
and retorts are studied. A few attempts at classification have been made, but
interest in the genre seems to have stopped short of an in-depth analysis of
the many possible meanings and functions of taunts, with the exception of
the research reported in 1975 by Keith T. Kernan and Claudia Mitchell-
Kernan. These scholars compared children's insults in the United States and
Samoa. They analyzed insult behavior with the intention of studying the
process of enculturation, because of the tendency for such speech acts to carry
statements of cultural values. Their research findings indicated that the per-
son insulted is depicted as deviating from culturally defined values. In both
cultures, the children's estimations of the extent to which cultural values are
implicit in the insults were close to those of the adults. What is still needed
in the study of children's taunts and other forms of aggressive verbal behavior
is an in-depth study of the use of taunts within the fuller context of children's
speech.
2. 24 TEASES AND PRANKS
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? ? SECTION IV
OVERVIEW
SETTINGS AND ACTIVITIES
Brian Sutton-Smith
There is a striking contrast between the male-centered interest of the follow-
ing three chapters by Mergen, Bronner, and Mechling, and the focus on fe-
males in the work of Zumwalt, Beresin, and Hughes. The latter chapters were
microscaled and highly focused; the former are relatively diffuse and wide-
ranging, and that difference might not be accidental. In the following three
chapters there is a noticeable absence of girls on the streets, playing with
material culture and being captured in total institutions. Here gender dif-
ference and same-gender sensitivity combine in an uncertain and perhaps
stereotypic amalgam. Fortunately, the combination of the two sections may
provide the needed balance.
Within this section we move from a largely historical account of the
impact of playgrounds and street play on the behavior of children,
"urbanizations and its discontents" as Mergen calls it, to a more arcadian
account of the multiple ways in which children themselves transform objects
or their environments, "a traditional creative encounter with physical
things," as Bronner puts it. Finally, Mechling gives us a sample of those more
captive environments, such as summer camps, boarding schools, hospital
wards, and orphanages, where "the vibrant resisting folk culture" is carried
on, though he seeks to attenuate the suggestion that these are special envi-
ronments by suggesting that in modern society we are all prisoners. Our point
throughout has been that, in part, children's folklore is an outcome of the
children as "prisoners" of a larger, normative society. Or at least their con-
dition is partly "prisonerlike," to give it a metaphoric rather than an exis-
tential flavor. Mechling's analysis, based on Goffman, of the various cultural
performances of the caretakers and the inmates, and of the interactions be-
tween the two, probably contributes the most in this Sourcebook to our
understanding of children's interstitial status and therefore interstitial cul-
ture. If we think of his staff as our parents and our children as his inmates,
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? ? then their rituals, legends, pranks, and games, together with their ceremo-
nies, parties, journals, and assemblies, all make a reasonable model for ev-
eryday children's folklore though the latter would, of course, be more
multicentered and less focused than the examples that he gives.
Roger Abrahams has suggested that it is at the borders between two
societies where tensions occur-here, adult and child-that there emerges
those various framed events that we choose to call jokes and games, which
are themselves a dramatizing of the differences between the two groups
(Abrahams 1981, 304). Out of this dynamic, the cloth of children's folklore
is woven. Some of the events have, of course, to do with the tensions among
the children themselves, and some between children and adults, at which
borders emerges subversive folklore, discussed by McMahon and Sutton-
Smith in the concluding chapter.
What is missing in this section on settings is probably two extremes.
At one end, we need more material on earlier pioneering conditions and ru-
ral play and, at the other, we need more on family play. Between these two
are needed accounts of urban, ethnic, suburban and future play. In the
catalogue Children's Play, Past, Present and Future the Please Touch
Museum of Philadelphia sought to remedy this deficiency (Sutton-Smith
1985). We know that behavior is closely related to settings and environments,
and that, therefore, it is reasonable to expect that forms of folklife in smaller
and less public spaces will be different from those associated with larger
groups. Only recently, however, has there been an emphasis on folklife in
private spaces like the home. For example, it was only in 1974 that the first
family folklore tent was erected at the Festival of American Folklife on the
National Mall. We discover in the work of Zeitlin, Kotkin, and Baker,
A Celebration of American Family Folklore (1982), many forms of family
folklore.
Recent interest in the family, although minimal, is hardly too soon,
given that it is generally true that children begin their expressive and sym-
bolic activities-their play, chants, rhymes, and tales-close to their parents
in and near their homes, irrespective of social status (Mergen 1982). Fur-
ther, the trend toward the embourgeoisement of our society in the past sev-
eral hundred years has meant that more and more children have spent more
time in the family rather than in public groups. The liberation of children
from the duties and discipline of preindustrial life and their involvement in
schools, recreation programs, and, increasingly, with the television screen
in their own rooms has wrought immense changes in children's lives. Such
changes have in many ways transformed for children the folklore that once
dominated and still engages those who remain in the streets and in the ru-
226 OVERVIEW: SETTINGS AND ACTIVITIES
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? ? ral areas of the world. Typical modern play involves a child toying with a
television-advertised object while solitarily watching a television program.
The array of handmade objects and equipment that was once a central part
of the child's play world, and which is described by Bronner in a subsequent
chapter, has been largely replaced by the multimillion-dollar toy industry and
the manufacture of mass-produced toys, board games, and video games. The
"Kiddie City" and "Toys R Us" emporia, are, for example, embodiments
of this change.
The story of this change even in the past hundred years waits to be
told, although we have a general picture of the shift in Sutton-Smith's His-
tory of Children's Play: The New Zealand Playground, 1840-1950 (1981a),
Mergen's Play and Playthings: A Reference Guide (1982), and, most recently,
Karin Calvert's Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Child-
hood, 1600-1900 (1992). One senses from such work that in the last century,
although the children were encouraged to be outdoors more than they are
today, there was nevertheless much home play. Available accounts of such play
in homes suggest that the relatively private, even free spaces such as bed-
rooms, attics, and basements in the home, and the higher chance of uninter-
rupted activity there made the home a rich and attractive place for many
middle-class children's expressive and symbolic activities (see Mergen 1982
for details from play autobiographies). Further, Dorothy Howard, in her
folklore autobiography of the 1902-10 period, Dorothy's World: Child-
hood in Sabine Bottom, 1902-1910 (1977), suggests that at least the rural
home of the last century was, to a great extent, a base for constructing origi-
nal playthings and "play pritties," as she calls them. The knife was the cen-
tral play object then, just as the ball was to be popular between the world
wars and as the board game has since become. With the knife, the boys in
their yards carved and whittled, made pea shooters, catapaults, whistles,
slings, bows, popguns, kites, whips, sledges, tree huts, and forts. Although
girls were seldom so free with pocketknives, they, for their part, engaged in
yard play with flowers, beads, berries, grass, plants, fruit, coins, buttons,
matches, eggs, shells, pets, and string figures. By the turn of the century,
with the encroachment of commercial materials for childhood, there were
scrapbooks of pictures, transfers, and fairy gardens, in contrast to the "play
pritties" of Dorothy Howard's world. In the homes of upper-class parents,
there were often parties or parlor games involving musical chairs, charades,
pretend tea parties, blindman's bluff, and much more (Sutton-Smith 1981a).
In today's urban and suburban apartment worlds, many children who have
virtually retired from the streets have, in many cases, shifted from dominantly
motor, physical and manual concerns to verbal and symbolic ones. Of course,
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? ? this is not to deny that hopscotch, jump rope and jacks, which have been
central to girls' games for over fifty years, continue to be played in the back-
yard, as do various chasing and hide-and-seek games, as well as Mother may
I, old witch, redlight, statues, ball-bouncing, and hand-clapping games. Girls
still play these games, both at home and school, although only at home if
there are enough playmates present. Likewise, boys' concern with sports
continues-although it is confined to yards at home. They catch ball, shoot
baskets, trap soccer balls and hit pucks, but these games really require the
street or the playground. Adaptations to the backyard can be made but may
be dangerous to shrubs, lawns, and flower gardens. Although today the home
and yard are still the places where children prepare and practice for the out-
side world, the world being prepared for is rather different from the world
of yesteryear.
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? ? II CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL
AND PLAYGROUNDS
Bernard Mergen
Schools and playgrounds are virtually synonymous with childhood in con-
temporary America, but their importance to children's folklore is of relatively
recent origin. Only after the middle of the nineteenth century did the ma-
jority of children attend school, and those that did rarely went for more than
a few years. Planned parks and playgrounds are even more recent. Never-
theless, the years of childhood are brief, and many generations of children
have passed through schools and playgrounds in the past century. The in-
teraction between children and the physical environment of schools and play-
grounds is the focus of this chapter. The fact that less is known about the
actual behavior of children in these settings than about the settings them-
selves is a major limitation, but the growing literature on play, children's
folklore, the history of childhood, and the cultural meanings of space makes
clear that the scene of a child's play helps to shape the content.
Interest in the relationships between children's lore and their environ-
ment, what Gary Fine has called the "ecotypic" approach to folklore, need
not exclude other approaches (Fine 1980d, 180). Indeed, as the literature
illustrates, we must be ready to ask a broad range of questions about
children's cognitive and physiological development, about their concepts of
space and place, about the influence of adults and peers, about the games
and traditions children bring to the school and playground, and about the
uses they make of their physical environment. Yi-Fu Tuan, drawing on the
insights of Piaget and others, speculates that "place, to the child, is a large
and somewhat immobile type of object" (1977, 29). Later, as their geographi-
cal horizons expand, children interact with objects and places with imagi-
nation, transforming physical reality through fantasy, active play, or simply
by ignoring it.
This ability to transform, or even transcend, physical space is prob-
ably functional in the child's development. As Gaston Bachelard argues in
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? ? his stimulating reflections on the phenomenology of space, imagination sepa-
rates a person from the past, as well as from reality, causing him to face the
future (1964, xxx). A child's ability to imagine, to create, to anticipate the
future is clearly part of the learning process. In part, the child uses his imagi-
nation in an attempt to control the scene in which he finds himself. In school
and schoolyard the struggle is between children and adults as well as among
children themselves, while in streets, parks, and playgrounds the interaction
is largely among peers. Melvin Williams, describing a black, inner-city jun-
ior high school in Pittsburgh in the 1970s, concludes:
I have never seen students more adept and skillful at manipulating
the behavioral dynamics of their classrooms. . . . Each one attempted
to outperform the others in acts that denied, defiled, and defied the
classroom setting. The student audience encouraged the behavior and
reinforced it whenever possible. In such frenzies, chairs were thrown
across the classroom, ostensibly to strike another student but not in-
tended to make contact. Boys participated in animated wrestling, lift-
ing one another and pretending to slam each other to the floor with
a ferociousness that equalled a staged television fight. Other boys
threw one another against walls, making sounds that gave impres-
sions of crushing one's opponent . . . . Most of the students realized
that this was a staged drama, but they acted as if it was actually oc-
curring. (1981, 101)
On the unsupervised playground, evidence suggests that children negotiate
their own uses of space (Opie and Opie 1969; Hayward, Rothenberg, and
Beasley 1974; Sutton-Smith 1981a; L. Hughes 1983; and Beresin 1993).
School, playground, even the streets may be scenes of contention, but
this is not always the case. Moreover, for children, play space is a continuum.
The journey from home and yard to school and playground is made by way
of steps, trees, curbs, alleys, shops, lots, and dozens of other places useful
for play (Ward 1978). Roger Hart's pioneering study Children's Experience
of Place (1979) established a number of useful working hypotheses. For ex-
ample, he found that parentally defined "free range" for children increased
in three steps. Children in the first and second grade in the small New En-
gland town where he conducted his research were not permitted to go be-
yond seeing and calling distance. In grades 3 and 4 the increased frequency
of group play allowed the children to go as far as three hundred yards from
home. Fifth and sixth graders, particularly boys who had acquired bicycles,
were given a wide range, "with permission," or the distance was defined by
230 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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? ? the time it took to get there. In the upper grades the differences between boys
and girls increased, since boys were permitted greater freedom. Moreover,
Hart found that children used and valued various places differently at dif-
ferent times. Places were valued because of what could be done there (ball
fields, hills, trees, brooks), because of a person who lived or worked there
(homes, stores, streets), because of what could be bought there (supermar-
ket, service stations), because of how the place looked or felt (traffic lights,
library grounds), and by the lure of danger (streets, quarries, abandoned
buildings, graveyards). Although limited in many ways, Hart's study estab-
lishes a model for approaching the scenes of children's lore. What is the
scene? Who are the characters? What is the play?
CHILDREN'S ENVIRONMENTS IN THE PAST
Our evidence for children's lore before compulsory public education and the
playground movement comes chiefly from autobiographies and reminis-
cences, sometimes touched with a note of nostalgia. Linda Pollock's exhaus-
tive study of 496 published diaries and autobiographies (144 of them Ameri-
can), covering the years 1500 to 1900, asserts that play "does not appear
very often in the texts" and goes on to quote from several, including those
of Cotton Mather and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1983, 236). When
Edward Everett Hale describes Boston Common in the 1830s as "a play-
ground for children . . . ours to work our own sweet will upon," we get a
glimpse of the play spaces of a less organized era (Hale 1883, 65-66). Hale
played marbles, flew kites, rolled hoops, and played an elaborate game in-
volving the delivery and hiding of imaginary mail. A large stone on the Com-
mon gave rise to the superstition that if a person went around it backward
nine times saying the Lord's Prayer backward, his wish would come true.
made by Virtanen with regard to the use of verbal ambiguity and getting
the victim to fall into a trap of which he himself has participated in the mak-
ing, are common to many forms of children's lore, such as catch routines,
knock-knock jokes, riddles, and phone tricks.
Phone tricks, for example, all seem to share a common denomina-
tor: They are all fabrications that rely on ambiguity. This ambiguity exists
at several levels (Jorgensen 1984, 104-16). Perhaps the most apparent use
of ambiguity is with reference to speech play, or the ambiguity of words
(puns, homonyms, and so forth) that allows for the possibility of everyday
speech to be manipulated for fun and humor. A second level of ambiguity
is a kind of social-interactional ambiguity whereby the identity of the caller
may not be known to the victim. The use of the phone almost guarantees
that the identities of the individuals remain unknown. This ambiguity of
identity makes it quite easy for youngsters to engage in phone tricks and to
do the exasperating things that they would be highly unlikely to do in other,
less safe circumstances. The use of the telephone affords them an anonym-
ity that allows for a certain license to participate in this kind of trickery, rela-
tively free from the fear of the retribution or embarrassment that might oc-
cur in face-to-face settings (Jorgensen 1984). The last kind of ambiguity exists
at the level of social structure and is related to the position of the teenager
in the hierarchy of the social order. The adolescent in our society is in an
ambiguous period in his life, being neither child nor adult.
These phone tricks may be viewed as occurring at an ambiguous time
in the life of the caller, taking place in an ambiguous social-interactional set-
ting (because of the use of the phone), and sometimes utilizing the ambigu-
ous quality of words in order to play with everyday speech, to demonstrate
communicative competence, and to gain a sense of personal power (espe-
cially within the peer group). Phone tricks are just one example of the pranks
common to children's folklore.
Some of these behaviors are reserved for "special occasions. " In the
United States the two main times of the year historically set aside for the
playing of pranks and tricks are Halloween and April Fools' Day. The same
two days are set aside in the British Isles, with the addition of Mischief Night
on November 4 (the eve of Guy Fawkes Day), which is considered by lona
and Peter Opie (1959) to be a postponed celebration of Halloween. Mis-
chievous or impolite and disrespectful behavior by children on special days
of the year may be viewed as a reversal of everyday norms of polite behav-
ior and it is allowed to some extent or perhaps even anticipated. As long as
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? ? the tricksters and pranksters don't go too far-as long as their actions do
not injure anyone or cause great damage to property or life-the mischief
is usually excused. On some other day of the year it might not be. On Hal-
loween, as well as on Mischief Night in England, the behavioral reversals
tend to involve children and teenagers as initiators of unsociable acts aimed
either at peers, adults, or other authority figures, but on April Fools' Day
adults tend to join the children as the initiators of pranks and tricks. Many
of the traditional April Fools' tricks, such as the "fool's errand," involve face-
to-face interaction between the trickster and the victim, but most of the
Halloween pranks (which are often directed against personal property) oc-
cur under the cover of darkness: The pranksters are usually unseen and un-
known.
The unknown identity of the Halloween prankster is, of course, a
safeguard against retribution by the irate victim. The prankster's unsociable
and harmful behavior, however, is also reminiscent of the traditional behavior
associated with ancestors, ghosts, or other spirit powers, who are given free
rein to return to earth and cause trouble or play tricks on the living once a
year. Such practices are known in many widely separated cultures through-
out the world-from the Druidic celebration of Samhuin on the eve of 1
November to the Day of the Dead in Mexico, and even the Milamala har-
vest celebration reported by Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands (1954).
Some very creative and innovative pranks perpetrated by teenagers in New
York in the early 1970s are reported in an article published by Catherine
Harris Ainsworth entitled "Hallowe'en," which appeared in September of
1973 in the New York Folklore Quarterly. The following excerpts are from
essays on the topic of the celebration of Halloween, perceived and experi-
enced by 18- and 19-year-olds, and they illustrate some important points
about the social interactions and reversals of everyday polite behavior that
are associated with October 31 in our culture. Most of the teenagers who
chose to include reports of pranks they had played in their essays were boys,
although one young lady did mention briefly that she enjoyed tipping over
mailboxes and causing trouble by scaring people. Interestingly, one of the
best accounts (in terms of the most detailed recording of socially unaccept-
able behavior) was signed "anonymous," which is of course symbolic of the
social-interactional significance of this special night with regard to the prank-
ish behavior perpetrated by "unseen spirits of the night":
To start the night rolling we would soap a few windows and rap on
them when the people would be watching television. Next we found
a tree limb that grew over the road. A couple of us would climb up
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? ? and tie a dummy on a rope. As soon as a car was almost under the
tree, they swung the dummy right down in front of it. They would
either stop and get out and start cussing or just slow down and keep
going. (pages 180-81)
I remember Hallowe'en because that's the night the fire company was
called out to quench a blaze that measured a few inches in width but
stretched over two miles down the center of our local main road. It
was also the night the police received several complaints from irate
motorists who'd been shocked out of their pants when someone
dropped a very life-like looking dummy in front of their car. But as
the years passed, we became more mature, which is another way of
saying our plans became more devious, more daring, and more imagi-
native. Ours was the first town with a psychedelic cop car. It was also
the first with a stop and go light that turned green in all four direc-
tions at the same time. (pages 183-84)
Halloween is a night of mischief for all, not only for young children,
but also for the older teenagers. On the way to my friend's house I
paid a visit to a few of my neighbors. After receiving dirty looks from
them all year I thought it was an appropriate time to harass them.
So I broke a few of their pumpkins. I picked up my friends and we
headed out toward Main Street . . . We stood outside of Carrol's
Hamburger Place, freezing, for about an hour. We were trying to think
of something special to do. Then one kid came up with a great idea.
We decided to buy some eggs and plaster the cars of the other guys
that were hanging around Carrol's. Within a half hour every car at
Carrol's was dripping with egg yolk. The cold weather made the eggs
freeze almost instantly. We decided it was time to get home before
we either got ran over or shot. (page 186)
These essays show that much effort and ingenuity were involved in
the planning and executing of these Halloween pranks, many of which ulti-
mately involved adult authority figures. The two-mile long fire is a good
example of such creativity and ingenuity. Although this prank was attention
getting it remained relatively harmless.
There is also evidence to support the claim that "once a prankster,
always a prankster. " Although the types of pranks tend to change with age,
pranks remain part of the adult's repertoire. The young man quoted above,
says, "But as the years passed, we became more mature, which is another
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? ? way of saying our plans became more devious, more daring, and more imagi-
native. " It might also be noted that the young man who broke his neighbor's
pumpkins explained that he was taking the opportunity to do so on this night
of socially licensed misbehavior to retaliate for the dirty looks he had been
receiving from them all year long. One could say that this is the way pent-
up or repressed hostile emotions are expressed. The most common examples
of traditional Halloween pranks in the United States-such as removing gates
or barn doors, putting rockers in trees, putting wagons on roofs, turning over
outhouses, soaping windows-all involve either the partial destruction of
property or its removal from its proper place. These pranks tend to be indi-
rect assaults on persons through their property, rather than confrontation.
Conversely, on April Fools' Day, the object is not to damage someone else's
property but to cause embarrassment by casting the victim as socially in-
competent or foolish through various forms of trickery.
The practice of playing tricks on April Fools' Day is one that seems
to be particularly popular with school-aged children. The attraction of such
socially sanctioned trickery for young schoolchildren is evident in the words
of a twelve-year-old Scottish girl from Edinburgh who was interviewed by
lona and Peter Opie in connection with their research on "Huntigowk Day,"
the Scottish equivalent to April Fools' Day. The young girl told them:
"Huntigowk is a day I love. I like to put a basin of water at the side of my
sister's bed and hear her let out a yell when she puts her feet into it. I also
put an empty eggshell in an eggcup so that when she opens it she finds that
there is nothing inside it" (Opie and Opie 1959, 245). The playful delight
in teasing, trickery, and possibly even some undertones of sibling rivalry are
all noticeable in this child's testimony. Thus, April 1 might be characterized
as a socially sanctioned day on which behavior involving playful trickery can
be given free expression by those who find a special pleasure in such activ-
ity. It is important to add that the setting aside of this one day for such
licensed trickery allows for control of its duration (only a twenty-four-hour
period in the United States and only until noon in the British and Canadian
traditions) and of the traditional nature of the trickery and deceit (usually
only prescribed kinds of tricks are engaged in).
One way to look at April Fools' behavior is to see it as an inversion of
everyday politeness or face-saving behavior. This interpretation is based on
the assumption that in naturally occurring, everyday talk a certain serious-
ness is assumed to exist. Normally, speakers and listeners engaging in conver-
sation seek a common understanding of what is being discussed (Mehan and
Wood 1975, 124-25). In other words, attempts are normally made to com-
municate within a common frame of reference. During April Fools' trickery,
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? ? however, these assumptions of polite seriousness and a common frame of ref-
erence are abrogated. A deception is attempted, based on a lack of serious in-
tent, and the potential victim is unaware that the usual seriousness does not
apply to the situation at hand. The importance of the victim's being unaware
is well illustrated by the fact that it is easiest to accomplish successful decep-
tions early on the day of April 1 before potential victims have had tricks played
on them by other tricksters and have thus been alerted to the fact that it is a
day on which tricks and jokes are likely to occur.
The purpose of these tricks is to make the victim look foolish. The
victim is made into the fool as a result of his or her own actions, as is also
the case in children's catch routines, riddling, and knock-knock jokes. Con-
versely, in teases and taunts victimization does not usually depend on the
victim's actions. In most taunts, the body, language, or other characteristics
of the person are attacked simply and directly, and no specific social situa-
tion is necessary. Although the element of fabrication is largely missing, the
embarrassment and discomfort of the victim are still the major element.
TEASES
As will be recalled from the table in the introduction, I prefer to discrimi-
nate between taunts and teases on the basis of the degree of harm in the vic-
timization. I consider teases to be relatively mild, possibly even benevolent
and playful forms of social interaction of children and sometimes adults.
Valuable studies based on interviews with schoolchildren regarding
both taunting and the less disturbing kinds of teasing have been carried out
by Scandinavian folklorists Leea Virtanen in Finland (1978) and Erik Kaas
Nielsen in Denmark (1976). Each of these children's folklorists, working
separately, has identified forms of teasing (both verbal and nonverbal) that
can be interpreted as a sign of affection.
Virtanen makes some important observations concerning the inter-
pretation of aggressive teasing behavior in chapter five, "The Teasing Tra-
dition," of "Children's Lore" (1978). She says, "Actions which to an out-
sider seem aggressive are the socially acceptable manner of showing posi-
tive feelings" (page 61), and that girls are capable of regarding "heavy
handed treatment" by boys as evidence of positive feelings. This last obser-
vation is illustrated by the following excerpt from an interview with a young
schoolgirl: "The biggest sign of love was when he hit me on the head with
the atlas. It hurt, but it was lovely" (page 61). It is not known, of course, if
the boys who engage in this type of teasing would interpret their behavior
as a sign of love toward the girls! Virtanen cites other examples of nonver-
bal teases used by Finnish girls to demonstrate love for a particular boy, such
220 TEASES AND PRANKS
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? ? as lifting him by the hair and kicking him, or throwing things like snow-
balls, pebbles, or lumps of clay at him. Teases like these, which basically
involve chasing or attacking, have probably always been prevalent among
children. I recall kicking, slapping, and hair pulling as being favorite means
of gaining attention from the opposite sex when I was growing up in the
mid-1950s in southern California. Retaliation, such as washing the girl's face
"with a leather glove till she is as red as fire" (page 61) would follow if the
bid for attention was successful. (Ignoring such a claim to attention might
be considered to be an insult to the girl seeking such a response! ) Virtanen
believes that teases, which may also include verbal forms such as name calling
or the composing of witty jibes, are a means of establishing contact between
the sexes, and that each sex has its favorite procedures for doing so.
Virtanen's interpretation is supported by Nielsen's research (1976) into the
psychological motivations and sociological functions involved in teasing by
Danish schoolchildren (pages 53-54). In a personal communication (Septem-
ber 20, 1981) Nielsen expanded on the idea that the words, gestures, and
acts used in teasing are expressive forms of communication, codes that must
be decoded: "After all, teasing is a kind of code which you may/must inter-
pret according to your mood and relations to the teaser. " Nielsen's interviews
revealed that most pupils considered teasing to have both positive and nega-
tive aspects and that they understood that "in certain cases teasing is only
an attempt to create contact, especially in relation to the opposite sex" (1976,
53), findings very similar to those of Virtanen with regard to using teasing
as a means of reducing social distance between individuals. Four of the twelve
reasons noted by Nielsen for Danish schoolchildren's teasing are positive:
love (the parent's love for the child), friendship, and sympathy; love (emo-
tions for the other sex), flirtations, courting; playfulness, high spirits, need
for fun; isolation, solitude, teasing as a means of contact.
The excellent research done by these two Scandinavian children's folk-
lorists concerning the benevolent forms of teasing is supported by Richard W.
Howell in his work Language in Behavior (1976). Howell advances the idea
that playful teasing is an attempt to deny social distance and that it is there-
fore symbolic of a wished-for closeness between the people involved (page 4)
rather than a form of hostility or violence. This analysis of teasing as sym-
bolic of a potential closeness that does not quite exist seems applicable to the
boy-girl teasing reported by Virtanen and Nielsen. Play grouping according
to sex reflects the social distance between the sexes, especially in the school
context, and thus playful teasing (such as boys and girls chasing each other
or throwing snowballs or erasers at each other) could be viewed as an attempt
to seek contact in a relatively safe, nonserious manner.
zzI
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? ? TAUNTS
If teases can be viewed as contact-seeking devices, then taunts can be dis-
tinguished as verbal strategies that attempt the opposite-to increase the
social distance between people. While teases are characterized here as be-
ing mainly positive, taunts are usually motivated by more malicious inten-
tions and negative emotions (such as hatred, envy, displeasure, revenge, the
wish to dominate, or a desire to compensate for one's own weaknesses).
Children's taunts can be examined as reversals of everyday, or nor-
mally expected, behavior, as can most other tricks, pranks, and teases. The
norms of politeness in society are based on the assumption that it is to the
interest of all to attempt to maintain each other's sense of "face" (that is,
self-concept, or feelings of self-worth). Brown and Levinson (1978) have
labeled acts that threaten this mutual support of face as FTAs, "face-threat-
ening acts" (page 65). They have identified several kinds of FTAs, the two
main ones being "off the record" (more ambiguous, or "safe") and "on the
record" (no ambiguity, less "safe") (page 74).
Children's use of traditional taunts and retorts at the elementary-
school level places these strategies of verbal aggression into the "bald on
record" subdivision (page 65) in which there is no attempt at redressive ac-
tion (or "softening the blow") on the part of the speaker. Applying Brown
and Levinson's research on politeness behavior to the subject of children's
taunting strategies, it follows that this kind of verbal aggression is "the most
direct, clear, unambiguous and concise way possible" (page 74) to carry out
an FTA and thus attempt to bring about a loss of face or sense of personal
esteem to the victim.
The directness gained by using taunts as "bald on record" FTAs is
somewhat offset by the fact that such strategies are less safe than the "off
record" ones, which are more open to question or interpretation because of
their ambiguity. The use of "bald on record" FTAs is quite likely to upset
the victim and cause him or her to seek revenge when exposed to this di-
rect, clear, and unmistakably intentional form of verbal abuse. This element
of risk tends to support the idea that those who are not worried about the
risks are confident that their own power (verbal or physical) is superior to
that of their victims.
The reaction of the victim of such verbal abuse is important. Most
verbal assaults are said face-to-face to the intended victim, probably with
the purpose of observing his or her reaction, which it is hoped will be one
of embarrassment or hurt feelings. It is usually intended that the words cho-
sen for the verbal attack will wound the child in his area of greatest sensi-
tivity and cause him to be visibly upset. Crying is often the proof that this
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? ? goal has been achieved, as illustrated by the traditional chant "I made you
sigh, I made you sigh; And pretty soon I'll make you cry" (Millard 1945,
31). It is always possible, however, that through verbal agility (such as the
use of a clever retort, for example) or some other means, the quick-witted
child may be able to retaliate and thus reverse the potentially painful situa-
tion, making the aggressor the victim instead. In Virtanen's previously cited
research on children's verbal aggression, it has been observed that the chil-
dren who are the most defenseless and seem not to be able to fight back are
the ones who are most often chosen as victims, irrespective of the "undesir-
able" personal traits or other social "shortcomings" that might make them
appear to be logical candidates for such abuse (Virtanen 1978, 60).
As with the other traditional pranks, tricks, and teases discussed, it
should also be emphasized with regard to taunts that the context of their
use is crucial to their meaning. It is possible that the most vicious taunt could
be used in such a way that no real harm is intended or experienced by the
individuals involved. As an example of one of the many possible uses of ver-
bal aggression, Brown and Levinson discuss the use of seemingly threaten-
ing "bald on record" insults and jokes as communicative strategies for as-
serting that a certain degree of intimacy exists between the people involved.
Thus there is minimal danger of "face" being threatened. Conventionalized
insults can thus solidify friendship (page 234). In addition, many adults I
have questioned in the last few years on the subject of traditional taunts and
retorts claim that some of their favorite rhymes as children were valued for
their humor rather than their malice. They recalled using taunts such as
"Fatty and Skinny were laying in bed; Fatty rolled over and Skinny was
dead" in a joking manner, more for the fun of chanting it than for hurting
another child's feelings. It should be remembered that children use taunts
for a variety of purposes, and that fact should be kept in mind in the at-
tempt to understand the use of taunts and retorts.
Those who wish to pursue this genre of children's folklore will find
samples of children's taunts and retorts in various collections of children's
lore. Examples of such collections in the English-language tradition include
the work of P. H. Evans, Knapp and Knapp, Withers, Northall, Yoffie, and
Winslow. In addition, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959) by
Iona and Peter Opie is a comprehensive and well-documented collection of
various genres, including traditional taunts and retorts from the British Isles.
The significance of the material and its analysis, however, is not adequately
dealt with (Bernstein 1960).
Journal articles dealing exclusively with the subject of children's jeers
are fairly rare. In 1945 an article by Anna K. Stimson dealing with taunts
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? ? used in New York City at the turn of the century appeared in the Journal of
American Folklore, and, also in 1945, a similar study of "chaffing formu-
las" by Eugenia Millard appeared in the New York Folklore Quarterly.
Millard's article contained a rudimentary attempt at classification on the
twofold basis of ethical standards and pseudo-prejudices, but her main in-
terest was in establishing the antiquity of the rhymes within the English tra-
dition. In a more recent work, Winslow (1969) constructed a classification
scheme based on derogatory epithets, one that he believed could be applied
to the traditional rhymed formulas used by children. His four categories in-
cluded play on a child's name and comments on physical peculiarities, mental
traits, and social relationships.
Martha Wolfenstein's analysis of the thematic content and functions
of joking behavior in Children's Humor (1954) is a study of the meaning of
children's attempts to use language to solve emotional problems. Although
mainly concerned with joking and riddling, her analysis of underlying mo-
tives and her discussion of the use of rhyme and proper names give impor-
tant clues to similar processes that might also apply to the jeers used during
the child's latency period (six to twelve years), which also make extensive
use of rhymed taunts.
In general, the literature contains many collections in which taunts
and retorts are studied. A few attempts at classification have been made, but
interest in the genre seems to have stopped short of an in-depth analysis of
the many possible meanings and functions of taunts, with the exception of
the research reported in 1975 by Keith T. Kernan and Claudia Mitchell-
Kernan. These scholars compared children's insults in the United States and
Samoa. They analyzed insult behavior with the intention of studying the
process of enculturation, because of the tendency for such speech acts to carry
statements of cultural values. Their research findings indicated that the per-
son insulted is depicted as deviating from culturally defined values. In both
cultures, the children's estimations of the extent to which cultural values are
implicit in the insults were close to those of the adults. What is still needed
in the study of children's taunts and other forms of aggressive verbal behavior
is an in-depth study of the use of taunts within the fuller context of children's
speech.
2. 24 TEASES AND PRANKS
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? ? SECTION IV
OVERVIEW
SETTINGS AND ACTIVITIES
Brian Sutton-Smith
There is a striking contrast between the male-centered interest of the follow-
ing three chapters by Mergen, Bronner, and Mechling, and the focus on fe-
males in the work of Zumwalt, Beresin, and Hughes. The latter chapters were
microscaled and highly focused; the former are relatively diffuse and wide-
ranging, and that difference might not be accidental. In the following three
chapters there is a noticeable absence of girls on the streets, playing with
material culture and being captured in total institutions. Here gender dif-
ference and same-gender sensitivity combine in an uncertain and perhaps
stereotypic amalgam. Fortunately, the combination of the two sections may
provide the needed balance.
Within this section we move from a largely historical account of the
impact of playgrounds and street play on the behavior of children,
"urbanizations and its discontents" as Mergen calls it, to a more arcadian
account of the multiple ways in which children themselves transform objects
or their environments, "a traditional creative encounter with physical
things," as Bronner puts it. Finally, Mechling gives us a sample of those more
captive environments, such as summer camps, boarding schools, hospital
wards, and orphanages, where "the vibrant resisting folk culture" is carried
on, though he seeks to attenuate the suggestion that these are special envi-
ronments by suggesting that in modern society we are all prisoners. Our point
throughout has been that, in part, children's folklore is an outcome of the
children as "prisoners" of a larger, normative society. Or at least their con-
dition is partly "prisonerlike," to give it a metaphoric rather than an exis-
tential flavor. Mechling's analysis, based on Goffman, of the various cultural
performances of the caretakers and the inmates, and of the interactions be-
tween the two, probably contributes the most in this Sourcebook to our
understanding of children's interstitial status and therefore interstitial cul-
ture. If we think of his staff as our parents and our children as his inmates,
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? ? then their rituals, legends, pranks, and games, together with their ceremo-
nies, parties, journals, and assemblies, all make a reasonable model for ev-
eryday children's folklore though the latter would, of course, be more
multicentered and less focused than the examples that he gives.
Roger Abrahams has suggested that it is at the borders between two
societies where tensions occur-here, adult and child-that there emerges
those various framed events that we choose to call jokes and games, which
are themselves a dramatizing of the differences between the two groups
(Abrahams 1981, 304). Out of this dynamic, the cloth of children's folklore
is woven. Some of the events have, of course, to do with the tensions among
the children themselves, and some between children and adults, at which
borders emerges subversive folklore, discussed by McMahon and Sutton-
Smith in the concluding chapter.
What is missing in this section on settings is probably two extremes.
At one end, we need more material on earlier pioneering conditions and ru-
ral play and, at the other, we need more on family play. Between these two
are needed accounts of urban, ethnic, suburban and future play. In the
catalogue Children's Play, Past, Present and Future the Please Touch
Museum of Philadelphia sought to remedy this deficiency (Sutton-Smith
1985). We know that behavior is closely related to settings and environments,
and that, therefore, it is reasonable to expect that forms of folklife in smaller
and less public spaces will be different from those associated with larger
groups. Only recently, however, has there been an emphasis on folklife in
private spaces like the home. For example, it was only in 1974 that the first
family folklore tent was erected at the Festival of American Folklife on the
National Mall. We discover in the work of Zeitlin, Kotkin, and Baker,
A Celebration of American Family Folklore (1982), many forms of family
folklore.
Recent interest in the family, although minimal, is hardly too soon,
given that it is generally true that children begin their expressive and sym-
bolic activities-their play, chants, rhymes, and tales-close to their parents
in and near their homes, irrespective of social status (Mergen 1982). Fur-
ther, the trend toward the embourgeoisement of our society in the past sev-
eral hundred years has meant that more and more children have spent more
time in the family rather than in public groups. The liberation of children
from the duties and discipline of preindustrial life and their involvement in
schools, recreation programs, and, increasingly, with the television screen
in their own rooms has wrought immense changes in children's lives. Such
changes have in many ways transformed for children the folklore that once
dominated and still engages those who remain in the streets and in the ru-
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? ? ral areas of the world. Typical modern play involves a child toying with a
television-advertised object while solitarily watching a television program.
The array of handmade objects and equipment that was once a central part
of the child's play world, and which is described by Bronner in a subsequent
chapter, has been largely replaced by the multimillion-dollar toy industry and
the manufacture of mass-produced toys, board games, and video games. The
"Kiddie City" and "Toys R Us" emporia, are, for example, embodiments
of this change.
The story of this change even in the past hundred years waits to be
told, although we have a general picture of the shift in Sutton-Smith's His-
tory of Children's Play: The New Zealand Playground, 1840-1950 (1981a),
Mergen's Play and Playthings: A Reference Guide (1982), and, most recently,
Karin Calvert's Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Child-
hood, 1600-1900 (1992). One senses from such work that in the last century,
although the children were encouraged to be outdoors more than they are
today, there was nevertheless much home play. Available accounts of such play
in homes suggest that the relatively private, even free spaces such as bed-
rooms, attics, and basements in the home, and the higher chance of uninter-
rupted activity there made the home a rich and attractive place for many
middle-class children's expressive and symbolic activities (see Mergen 1982
for details from play autobiographies). Further, Dorothy Howard, in her
folklore autobiography of the 1902-10 period, Dorothy's World: Child-
hood in Sabine Bottom, 1902-1910 (1977), suggests that at least the rural
home of the last century was, to a great extent, a base for constructing origi-
nal playthings and "play pritties," as she calls them. The knife was the cen-
tral play object then, just as the ball was to be popular between the world
wars and as the board game has since become. With the knife, the boys in
their yards carved and whittled, made pea shooters, catapaults, whistles,
slings, bows, popguns, kites, whips, sledges, tree huts, and forts. Although
girls were seldom so free with pocketknives, they, for their part, engaged in
yard play with flowers, beads, berries, grass, plants, fruit, coins, buttons,
matches, eggs, shells, pets, and string figures. By the turn of the century,
with the encroachment of commercial materials for childhood, there were
scrapbooks of pictures, transfers, and fairy gardens, in contrast to the "play
pritties" of Dorothy Howard's world. In the homes of upper-class parents,
there were often parties or parlor games involving musical chairs, charades,
pretend tea parties, blindman's bluff, and much more (Sutton-Smith 1981a).
In today's urban and suburban apartment worlds, many children who have
virtually retired from the streets have, in many cases, shifted from dominantly
motor, physical and manual concerns to verbal and symbolic ones. Of course,
22zz7
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? ? this is not to deny that hopscotch, jump rope and jacks, which have been
central to girls' games for over fifty years, continue to be played in the back-
yard, as do various chasing and hide-and-seek games, as well as Mother may
I, old witch, redlight, statues, ball-bouncing, and hand-clapping games. Girls
still play these games, both at home and school, although only at home if
there are enough playmates present. Likewise, boys' concern with sports
continues-although it is confined to yards at home. They catch ball, shoot
baskets, trap soccer balls and hit pucks, but these games really require the
street or the playground. Adaptations to the backyard can be made but may
be dangerous to shrubs, lawns, and flower gardens. Although today the home
and yard are still the places where children prepare and practice for the out-
side world, the world being prepared for is rather different from the world
of yesteryear.
2zz8 OVERVIEW: SETTINGS AND ACTIVITIES
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? ? II CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL
AND PLAYGROUNDS
Bernard Mergen
Schools and playgrounds are virtually synonymous with childhood in con-
temporary America, but their importance to children's folklore is of relatively
recent origin. Only after the middle of the nineteenth century did the ma-
jority of children attend school, and those that did rarely went for more than
a few years. Planned parks and playgrounds are even more recent. Never-
theless, the years of childhood are brief, and many generations of children
have passed through schools and playgrounds in the past century. The in-
teraction between children and the physical environment of schools and play-
grounds is the focus of this chapter. The fact that less is known about the
actual behavior of children in these settings than about the settings them-
selves is a major limitation, but the growing literature on play, children's
folklore, the history of childhood, and the cultural meanings of space makes
clear that the scene of a child's play helps to shape the content.
Interest in the relationships between children's lore and their environ-
ment, what Gary Fine has called the "ecotypic" approach to folklore, need
not exclude other approaches (Fine 1980d, 180). Indeed, as the literature
illustrates, we must be ready to ask a broad range of questions about
children's cognitive and physiological development, about their concepts of
space and place, about the influence of adults and peers, about the games
and traditions children bring to the school and playground, and about the
uses they make of their physical environment. Yi-Fu Tuan, drawing on the
insights of Piaget and others, speculates that "place, to the child, is a large
and somewhat immobile type of object" (1977, 29). Later, as their geographi-
cal horizons expand, children interact with objects and places with imagi-
nation, transforming physical reality through fantasy, active play, or simply
by ignoring it.
This ability to transform, or even transcend, physical space is prob-
ably functional in the child's development. As Gaston Bachelard argues in
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? ? his stimulating reflections on the phenomenology of space, imagination sepa-
rates a person from the past, as well as from reality, causing him to face the
future (1964, xxx). A child's ability to imagine, to create, to anticipate the
future is clearly part of the learning process. In part, the child uses his imagi-
nation in an attempt to control the scene in which he finds himself. In school
and schoolyard the struggle is between children and adults as well as among
children themselves, while in streets, parks, and playgrounds the interaction
is largely among peers. Melvin Williams, describing a black, inner-city jun-
ior high school in Pittsburgh in the 1970s, concludes:
I have never seen students more adept and skillful at manipulating
the behavioral dynamics of their classrooms. . . . Each one attempted
to outperform the others in acts that denied, defiled, and defied the
classroom setting. The student audience encouraged the behavior and
reinforced it whenever possible. In such frenzies, chairs were thrown
across the classroom, ostensibly to strike another student but not in-
tended to make contact. Boys participated in animated wrestling, lift-
ing one another and pretending to slam each other to the floor with
a ferociousness that equalled a staged television fight. Other boys
threw one another against walls, making sounds that gave impres-
sions of crushing one's opponent . . . . Most of the students realized
that this was a staged drama, but they acted as if it was actually oc-
curring. (1981, 101)
On the unsupervised playground, evidence suggests that children negotiate
their own uses of space (Opie and Opie 1969; Hayward, Rothenberg, and
Beasley 1974; Sutton-Smith 1981a; L. Hughes 1983; and Beresin 1993).
School, playground, even the streets may be scenes of contention, but
this is not always the case. Moreover, for children, play space is a continuum.
The journey from home and yard to school and playground is made by way
of steps, trees, curbs, alleys, shops, lots, and dozens of other places useful
for play (Ward 1978). Roger Hart's pioneering study Children's Experience
of Place (1979) established a number of useful working hypotheses. For ex-
ample, he found that parentally defined "free range" for children increased
in three steps. Children in the first and second grade in the small New En-
gland town where he conducted his research were not permitted to go be-
yond seeing and calling distance. In grades 3 and 4 the increased frequency
of group play allowed the children to go as far as three hundred yards from
home. Fifth and sixth graders, particularly boys who had acquired bicycles,
were given a wide range, "with permission," or the distance was defined by
230 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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? ? the time it took to get there. In the upper grades the differences between boys
and girls increased, since boys were permitted greater freedom. Moreover,
Hart found that children used and valued various places differently at dif-
ferent times. Places were valued because of what could be done there (ball
fields, hills, trees, brooks), because of a person who lived or worked there
(homes, stores, streets), because of what could be bought there (supermar-
ket, service stations), because of how the place looked or felt (traffic lights,
library grounds), and by the lure of danger (streets, quarries, abandoned
buildings, graveyards). Although limited in many ways, Hart's study estab-
lishes a model for approaching the scenes of children's lore. What is the
scene? Who are the characters? What is the play?
CHILDREN'S ENVIRONMENTS IN THE PAST
Our evidence for children's lore before compulsory public education and the
playground movement comes chiefly from autobiographies and reminis-
cences, sometimes touched with a note of nostalgia. Linda Pollock's exhaus-
tive study of 496 published diaries and autobiographies (144 of them Ameri-
can), covering the years 1500 to 1900, asserts that play "does not appear
very often in the texts" and goes on to quote from several, including those
of Cotton Mather and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1983, 236). When
Edward Everett Hale describes Boston Common in the 1830s as "a play-
ground for children . . . ours to work our own sweet will upon," we get a
glimpse of the play spaces of a less organized era (Hale 1883, 65-66). Hale
played marbles, flew kites, rolled hoops, and played an elaborate game in-
volving the delivery and hiding of imaginary mail. A large stone on the Com-
mon gave rise to the superstition that if a person went around it backward
nine times saying the Lord's Prayer backward, his wish would come true.
